BODIES, EMBODIMENT AND FEELING

Abstract

This chapter asks how we might make historical sense of the materiality of emotions through a focus on the body. Bodies came to be articulated in modern cultures as canvases of emotion, linking bodied sensation to feeling. Simultaneously, prevailing discourses of mind-body dualism rendered the body a site of discipline, in the service of cultivating appropriate emotional responses. Scalar analysis, developed by geographers, might allow historians of emotion to make sense of the ways in which bodies are implicated in larger socio-historical processes. To unpack these themes, this chapter uses a microhistory of a college for women, established by British and American missionaries in late colonial India.